The house of Valois had spent all its strength, and the four sons of the gallant Henry II, three of whom were to be kings in turn, were fated to be weak and sickly. Francis drooped and pined, and a year had barely passed before his reign was ended, and Mary, patient nurse at his side, was made a widow. Charles, the second brother, came to the throne, only to find it a place of weariness and regret, and to shudder at the horrors of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve, planned by his mother. Perhaps it was as well for Mary that her reign in France had ended. The land had fallen into evil days, wherein there was little happiness for any one. The Queen of Scots, still only a girl, went back to her northern home, and the people of that mountainous land were glad to welcome her to the old historic Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh. But even when she was leaving France her cousin Elizabeth the English Queen showed her enmity. Mary had asked to be allowed to pass through England on her way to Scotland, but this Elizabeth refused, and Mary was obliged to make the long sea-voyage. The youth and beauty and the sweet manner of the young Queen won all Scotch hearts to her. She was at once beset by royal suitors; the King of Sweden, the Archduke Charles, son of the Holy Roman Emperor, and Don Carlos, son of Philip II of Spain, all wanted to marry her. In the midst of the plots and plans of her statesmen the young Queen took matters into her own hands and married her cousin, the handsome Earl of Darnley, whom she loved with all the passion of her nature. Though the Scotch people had longed to have their Queen home again they did not make her happy when she lived with them. Plots and counterplots surrounded her, the leaders of the Catholics and the Protestants were continually fighting over her, and the dashing Darnley proved a weak and vicious man. Mary did what she could to steer her course through these troubled waters, but she was met by treachery on every hand. At last she was betrayed by some powerful men who wished to be rid of her and to rule the kingdom as guardians for her infant son, Prince James. She was delivered over to the English, and charges were brought against her of having conspired against Queen Elizabeth. Her judges found her guilty; the English Queen, remembering how Mary had been proclaimed in France as Queen of England, turned a deaf ear to all pleas for mercy, and so Mary, the beautiful, heroic Queen of Scotland, came to her death on the scaffold. Like so many others who had been brought up in royal palaces in that glittering but cruel age she met a tragic fate not so much on account of her own acts as through the bitter hatreds of other people.